“Music is an important way to connect people,” said former Milwaukeean Michael Dorf, now of New York City. And he should know.
He has been providing music to people for a long time. Not as a musician, but as founder-owner-operator of a nightclub and a recording label, and most recently as a festival director.
Last week, just before the High Holidays began, the Big Apple saw the conclusion of a New York Jewish Music and Heritage Festival, billed as “a one-week cultural celebration of the 350th anniversary” of the arrival of the first group of Jews to settle in what would become the United States.
Dorf was this festival’s executive producer. He presided over six days of concerts that ranged in musical style from classical to cantorial to klezmer; and that took place in venues from the JCC in Manhattan to the 92nd St. YMHA to the Satalla world music café to the Eldridge Street Synagogue.
“What’s beautiful about New York is that there are so many [Jewish] institutions” and “so many venues” in which “to showcase great music,” Dorf said in a recent telephone interview.
Apparently, the festival was a big success. Dorf said that some 12,000 people attended the various events, and the festival will likely become an annual event.
“I’m very excited about doing this down the line on an annual basis,” Dorf said. “I’m certain it can continue to increase in stature.”
A climatic event of the festival — and what Dorf said was “the highlight for me” — took place Sept. 12, the festival’s sixth day, with a reenactment at the South Street Seaport of the landing of 23 Jewish settlers in what was then New Amsterdam on that day in 1654.
Dorf said that some 7,500 people came to the port that day for the reenactment and the other events.
Dorf — whose parents, Harriet and Jerry, still live in the Milwaukee area — went to New York in 1985 and founded there the Knitting Factory club the following year. The club soon became a headquarters for avant-garde jazz and rock.
It also became a prime outlet for some of the most inventive and “radical” explorations of the klezmer revival. It also created its own recording label and ran small-scale Jewish music and cultural festivals with such names as “Jewsapalooza” and “Cyber-Seder.”
In fact, Dorf said that it was after he produced a “celebrity seder” last April that he got a call from the UJA-Federation of New York asking him to work on the 350 celebration festival.
Dorf said that while he still owns a 30 percent interest in the Knitting Factory and still sits on its board, he left active participating in its operations in 2002.
The Sept. 11, 2001, events “really affected my thinking about the world,” he said. “For me, what it said was that life is short and precious; and do I want my kids [he has twin six-year old sons and an 8-month old daughter] saying, ‘My dad runs a club.’ I wanted to do something more meaningful with my life.”
His primary activity right now is the creation of a 1,500-seat performing arts center, called the Art Exchange, to be located in the Wall Street area and scheduled to open in 2005. He is doing this to “help rebuild lower Manhattan” by “using culture and arts and my skills in creating a performance space,” he said.
But that isn’t all. He has also helped create a once-a-week, independent Hebrew school for pre-kindergarten through third grade children. Called Tribeca Hebrew, it has been in existence for about two years, but already has eight classes with 80 students and a staff of one director/teacher and three part-time teachers.
Dorf said the inspiration for this went back to his Milwaukee years. “If I was to put one finger on what gave me a positive Jewish identity, it was Camp Interlaken,” now called the Steve and Shari Sadek Family Camp Interlaken, the Eagle River resident camp run by the Harry & Rose Samson Family Jewish Community Center.
Dorf attended that camp for ten years, and he wants Tribeca Hebrew to “mimic” the camp’s program as best it can “to enable kids to feel proud of their Jewishness.”
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